This issue of The Stranger was a nightmare to produce. The Bumbershoot guide, which is basically a bonus edition of The Stranger tucked into the regular one, goes to the printer two days after this issue. Plus, we're working on our amateur porn contest Hump!, our Back to School issue, a fashion issue, and the fast-approaching Genius Awards. Plus, keeping up with Slog. Plus, everyone on staff has a personal life, a million side projects, etc.

The other day, I went to lunch with tireless theater editor and small-animal hunter Brendan Kiley, and we had a hang-in-there conversation about getting everything done and (the harder part) making sure the stuff we were working on was good. When we got back to the office, I realized I'd forgotten to assign an article for this week's book section. The deadline was a day away. It was too late to ask anyone else to read something and review it. Piles of books sent by publishers for review consideration crowd the office—thick, probably excellent books about this or that. Guiltily, I chose the smallest one. The very first page says, reassuringly: "Good enough." Then there's a page that says, "Other books by the author," and the rest of the page is blank.

The book is called The Underachiever's Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great. (On the cover and title page the word "Underachiever's" doesn't fit on its own line, so it's broken at the V.) It's approximately the height and width of a postcard, and it's 85 pages long, not including the final chapter, 10 blank pages titled "Some blank pages." Interspersed throughout the book are drawings of light bulbs in the center of which are key points reiterated in all caps, like "GOING THE EXTRA MILE LEADS TO EXHAUSTION" and "BEING ALIVE IS BY FAR YOUR GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT" and "UGLY PEOPLE HAVE GOOD SEX, TOO." Between these light bulbs is calming, unpretentious text by Ray Bennett, M.D., a "medial specialist in Seattle and a recovering overachiever," according to his bio.

Bennett's idea is that success is overrated and that underachievement is way more pleasant. "The achievement lobby is powerful, and underachievement is, surprisingly, not as easy as it should be," he writes in the introduction, which is all of five short paragraphs. "Our world is so full of unrelenting messages about being the best you can be that it may not have occurred to you to try for anything less." In the ensuing pages, he argues that success is a "dangerous addiction," that it does not make you happy, that striving comes at great expense ("How many brilliant careers are coupled with disastrous marriages?"), and that accomplishment breeds social resentment. "If there are winners, there are also losers, so if you're 'winning,' what does that mean they're doing? Must you cast your friends and loved ones in such comparative shade? The truth is, if you had any notions of making people admire you by accomplishing great things in life, forget it. You're doing more harm than good. Let us all join hands and do less together. Then maybe let's all take a nap."

Bennett, nodding toward the conventions of self-help, divides his philosophy into 10 principles (he makes a joke about not having more), and then he applies them to the workplace, love, health, money, parenting, and religion. The facts and studies Bennett references are clarifying, but more convincing is his own commentary—that "For too many people, faith becomes another means of achievement" (people feel the need to make ever more aggrandizing gestures of their faith, which is how we end up with planes flying into buildings); that, financially speaking, by "avoiding the temptation of huge gains, you'll enjoy the safety of avoiding huge losses"; that "with all the time saved up by not working, underachievers can take up hobbies that will make them far more interesting to their friends. And they'll have time to spend with their friends. So they'll be able to keep their friends."

I judge this book to be excellent—short, sobering, funny, helpful. I read it in about half an hour, which allowed me to have some semblance of a weekend. I spent most of it with a friend I hadn't seen in a long time.

frizzelle@thestranger.com